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Open Training for Open Science

- December 21, 2014 in Featured, Reproducibility, Research, Tools

This is part of series of blog posts highlighting focus points for the Open Science Working Group in 2015. These draw on activities started in the community during 2014 and suggestions from the Working Group Advisory Board.

By opensourceway on Flickr under CC-BY-SA 2.0

By opensourceway on Flickr under CC-BY-SA 2.0

The Open Science Working group have long supported training for open science and early introduction of the principles of open and reproducible research in higher education (if not before!). This area was a focus in 2013-4 and grows in importance as we enter 2015 with the level of interest in openness in science increasing at a rapid rate. This post attempts to provide examples of training initiatives in which members of the working group have been involved and particular areas where work is lacking.

  1. Openness in higher education
  2. Strategies for training in open science
  3. The Open Science Training Initiative (OSTI)
  4. Developing Open Science Training Curricula
  5. Incorporating Open Science Training into Current Courses
  6. Conclusion
  7. Getting Involved in Open Science Training

Openness in higher education

Openness has the potential to radically alter the higher education experience. For instance, Joss Winn and Mike Neary posit that democratisation of participation and access could allow a reconstruction of the student experience in higher eduction to achieve this social relevance, they propose:

“To reconstruct the student as producer: undergraduate students working in collaboration with academics to create work of social importance that is full of academic content and value, while at the same time reinvigorating the university beyond the logic of market economics.”[1]

Openness focuses on sharing and collaboration for public good, at odds with the often competitive ethos in research and education. This involves more than simply implementing particular pedagogies or publishing open access articles – as Peters and Britez state bluntly in the first sentence of their book on open education:

“Open education involves a commitment to openness and is therefore inevitably a political and social project.” [2]

This could equally apply to open science. Openness is a cultural shift that is facilitated but not driven by legal and technical tools. In open education, for instance, open pedagogy makes use of now abundant openly licensed content but also places an emphasis on the social network of participants and the learner’s connections within this, emphasising that opening up the social institution of higher education is the true transformation. In open science, a lot of training focuses on the ability to manage and share research data, understand licensing and use new digital tools including training in coding and software engineering. However, understanding the social and cultural environment in which research takes place and how openness could impact that is arguably even more fundamental.

This section will focus on three topics around open science training, offering relevant linkages to educational literature and suggestions for teaching design:

  1. Use of open data and other open research objects in higher education.
  2. Use of open science approaches for research-based learning.
  3. Strategies for training in open science.

Strategies for training in open science

As openness is a culture and mindset, socio-cultural approach to learning and the construction of appropriate learning environments is essential. While the Winn and Neary [1] focus on the student as producer, Sophie Kay [3] argues that this can be detrimental as it neglects the role of students as research consumers which in turn neglects their ability to produce research outputs which are easily understood and reuseable.

Training in evolving methods of scholarly communication is imperative because there are major policy shifts towards a requirement for open research outputs at both the funder and learned society levels in the UK, EU and US. This is in addition to a growing grassroots movement in scientific communities, accelerated by the enormous shifts in research practice and wider culture brought about by pervasive use of the internet and digital technologies. The current generation of doctoral candidates are the first generation of `digital natives’, those who have grown up with the world wide web, where information is expected to be available on demand and ‘prosumers’ who consume media and information as well as producing their own via social media sites, are the norm. This norm is not reflected in most current scientific practice, where knowledge dissemination is still largely based on a journal system founded in the 1600s, albeit now in digital format. Current evidence suggests that students are not prepared for change, for example a major study of 17,000 UK graduate students [4] revealed that students:

  • hold many misconceptions about open access publishing, copyright and intellectual property rights;
  • are slow to utilise the latest technology and tools in their research work, despite being proficient in IT;
  • influenced by the methods, practices and views of their immediate peers and colleagues.

While pre-doctoral training is just as important, the majority of open science training initiatives documented thus far have aimed at the early career research stage, including doctoral students.

The Open Science Training Initiative (OSTI)

Photo courtesy of Sophie Kay, licensed under CC-BY.

OSTI photo courtesy of Sophie Kay, licensed under CC-BY.

Open Knowledge Panton Fellow Sophie Kay developed an Open Science Training Initiative (OSTI) [3], trialled in the Life Science Interface Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Oxford, which employs `rotation based learning’ (RBL) to cement the role of students as both producers and consumers of research through learning activities which promote the communication of coherent research stories that maximise reproducibility and usefulness. The content involves a series of mini-lectures around concepts, tools and skills required to practice openly, including an awareness of intellectual property rights and licensing, digital tools and services for collaboration, storage and dissemination, scholaraly communication and broader cultural contexts of open science.

The novel pedagogical approach employed was the creation of groups during an initiator phase where each group reproduces and documents a scientific paper, ensuring that outputs are in appropriate formats and properly licensed. Next the successor phase sees the reproduced work being rotated to another group who must again validate and build upon it in the manner of a novel research project, with daily short meetings with instructors to address any major issues. No intergroup communication is allowed during either phase, meaning that deficiencies in documentation and sticking points become obvious and hopefully leads to greater awareness among students of the adequacy of their future documentation. The pilot course involved 43 students and had a subject-specific focus on computational biology. Feedback was excellent with students feeling that they had learnt more about scientific working practises and indicating they were highly likely to incorporate ideas introduced during the course into their own practice.

This course design offers great scope for inter-institutional working and as it uses OERs the same training can be delivered in several locations but remains adaptable to local needs. RBL would be more challenging to mirror in wet labs but could be adapted for these settings and anyone is encouraged to remix and run their own instance. Sophie is especially keen to see the materials translated into further languages.

Developing Open Science Training Curricula

OSTI is one of the first courses to specifically address open science training but is likely the first of many as funding is becoming available from the European Commission and other organisations specifically aimed at developing open access and open science resources and pedagogies. Some of the key consideration for teaching design in this space are:

  1. How to address socio-cultural aspects in addition to imparting knowledge about legal and technical tools or subject-specific content and skills training.
  2. The current attitudes and perceptions of students towards intellectual property and the use of digital technologies and how this will impact their learning.
  3. The fast pace of change in policy requirements and researcher attitudes to aspects of open science.
  4. Additional time and resources required to run additional courses vs amelioration of existing activities.
Open science curriculum map at MozFest 2014.  Photo by Jenny Molloy, dedicated to the public domain via a CCZero waiver.

Open science curriculum map at MozFest 2014. Photo by Jenny Molloy, dedicated to the public domain via a CCZero waiver.

There are numerous one-off training events happening around the world, for instance the series of events funded by the FOSTER EU programme, which includes many workshops on open science. There are also informal trainings through organisations such as the Open Science working group local groups. Open science principles are incorporated into certain domain-specific conferences or skill-specific programmes like Software Carpentry Workshops, which have a solid focus on reproducibility and openness alongside teaching software engineering skills to researchers.

There are no established programmes and limited examples of open science principles incorporated into undergraduate or graduate curricula across an entire module or course. Historically, there have been experiments with Open Notebook Science, for instance Jean-Claude Bradley’s work used undergraduates to crowdsource solubility data for chemical compounds. Anna Croft from Bangor University presented her experiences encouraging chemistry undergraduates to use open notebooks at OKCon 2011 and found that competition between students was a barrier to uptake. At a graduate level, Brian Nosek has taught research methods courses incorporating principles of openness and reproducibility (Syllabus) and a course on improving research (Syllabus). The Centre for Open Science headed by Nosek also has a Collaborative Replications and Education Project (CREP) which is an excellent embodiment of the student as producer model and incorporates many aspects of open and reproducible science through encouraging students to replicate studies. More on this later!

It is clear that curricula, teaching resources and ideas would be useful to open science instructors and trainer at this stage. Billy Meinke and Fabiana Kubke helpfully delved into a skills-based curriculum in more depth during Mozilla Festival 2014 with their mapping session. Bill Mills of Mozilla Science Lab recently published a blog post on a similar theme and has started a pad to collate further information on current training programmes for open science. In the US, NCAES ran a workshop developing a curriculum for reproducible science followed by a workshop on Open Science for Synthesis .

NESCent ran a curriculum building workshop in Dec 2014 (see wiki). Several participants in the workshop have taught their own courses on Tools for Reproducible Research (Karl Broman) or reproducibility in statistics courses (Jenny Bryan). This workshop was heavily weighted to computational and statistical research and favoured R as the tool of choice. Interestingly their curriculum looked very different to the MozFest map, which goes to show the breadth of perspectives on open science within various communities of researchers!

All of these are excellent starts to the conversation and you should contribute where possible! There is a strong focus on data-rich, computational science so work remains to rethink training for the wet lab sciences. Of the branches of skills identified by Billy and Fabiana, only two of seven relate directly to computational skills, suggesting that there is plenty of work to be done! For further ideas and inspiration, the following section details some ways in which the skills can be further integrated into the curriculum through existing teaching activities.

Skills map for Reproducible, Open and Collaborative Science. Billy Meinke and Fabiana Kubke's session at MozFest 2014.

Skills map for Reproducible, Open and Collaborative Science. Billy Meinke and Fabiana Kubke’s session at MozFest 2014.

Incorporating Open Science Training into Current Courses

Using the open literature to teach about reproducibility

Data and software is increasingly published alongside papers, ostensibly enabling reproduction of research. When students try to reanalyse, replicate or reproduce research as a teaching activity they are developing and using skills in statistical analysis, programming and more in addition to gaining exposure to the primary literature. As much published science is not reproducible, limitations of research documentation and experimental design or analysis techniques may become more obvious, providing a useful experiential lesson.

There is public benefit to this type of analysis. Firstly, whether works are reproducible or not is increasingly of interest particularly to computational research and various standards and marks of reproducibility have been proposed but the literature is vast and there is no mechanism widely under consideration for systematic retrospective verification and demarcation of reproduciblity. Performing this using thousands of students in the relevant discipline could rapidly crowdsource the desired information while fitting easily into standard components of current curricula and offering a valid and useful learning experience.

The effect of `many eyes’ engaging in post-publication peer review and being trained in reviewing may also throw up substantive errors beyond a lack of information or technical barriers to reproduction. The most high profile example of this is the discovery by graduate student Thomas Herndon of serious flaws in a prominent economics paper when he tried to replicate its findings [5,6]. These included coding errors, selective exclusion of data and unconventional weighting of statistics, meaning that a result which was highly cited by advocates of economic austerity measures and had clear potential to influence fiscal policy was in fact spurious. This case study provides a fantastic example of the need for open data and the social and academic value of reanalysis by students, with the support of faculty.

This possibility has not been picked up in many disciplines but the aforementioned CREP project aims to perform just such a crowd-sourced analysis and asks instructors to consider what might be possible through student replication. Grahe et al., suggest that:

“Each year, thousands of undergraduate projects are completed as part of the educational experience…these projects could meet the needs of recent calls for increased replications of psychological studies while simultaneously benefiting the student researchers, their instructors, and the field in general.” [7]

Frank and Saxe [8] support this promise, reporting that they found teaching replication to be enjoyable for staff and students and an excellent vehicle for educating about the importance of reporting standards, and the value of openness. Both publications suggest approaches to achieving this in the classroom and are well worth reading for further consideration and discussion about the idea.

Reanalysing open data

One step from reproduction of the original results is the ability to play with data and code. Reanalysis using different models or varying parameters to shift the focus of the analysis can be very useful, with recognition of the limitations of experimental design and the aims of the original work. This leads us to the real potential for novel research using open datasets. Some fields lend themselves to this more than others. For example, more than 50% of public health masters projects across three courses examined by Feldman et al. [9] used secondary data for their analyses rather than acquiring expensive and often long-term primary datasets. Analysis of large and complex public health data is a vital graduate competency, therefore the opportunity to grapple with the issues and complexities of real data rather than a carefully selected or contrived training set is vital.

McAuley et al. [10] suggest that the potential to generate linked data e.g. interconnecting social data, health statistics and travel information, is the real power of open data and can produce highly engaging educational experiences. Moving beyond educational value, Feldman et al. [9] argue that open data use in higher education research projects allows for a more rapid translation of science to practise. However, this can only be true if that research is itself shared with the wider community of practise, as advocated by Lompardi [11]. This can be accomplished through the canonical scientific publishing track or using web tools and services such as the figshare or CKAN open data repositories, code sharing sites and wikis or blogs to share discoveries.

In order to use these digital tools that form the bedrock of many open science projects and are slowly becoming fully integrated into scholarly communication systems, technological skills and understanding of the process of knowledge production and disemmination in the sciences is required. Students should be able to contextualise these resources within the scientific process to prepare them for a future in a research culture that is being rapidly altered by digital technologies. All of these topics, including the specific tools mentioned above, are covered by the ROCS skills mapping from MozFest, demonstrating that the same requirements are coming up repeatedly and independently.

Use of open science approaches for research-based learning

There are several powerful arguments as to why engaging students in research-based activities leads to higher level and higher quality learning in higher education and the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University called for research based learning to become the standard, stating a desire:

“…to turn the prevailing undergraduate culture of receivers into a culture of inquirers, a culture in which faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates share an adventure of discovery.”

The previous section emphasised the potential role of open content, namely papers, data and code in research-based learning. In addition, the growing number of research projects open to participation by all – including those designated as citizen science – can offer opportunities to engage in research that scales and contributes more usefully to science than small research projects that may be undertaken in a typical institution as part of an undergraduate course. These open science activities offer options for both wet and dry lab based activities in place or in addition to standard practical labs and field courses.

The idea of collaborative projects between institutions and even globally is not new, involvement in FOSS projects for computational subjects has long been recognised as an excellent opportunity to get experience of collaborative coding in large projects with real, often complex code bases and a `world-size laboratory’ [12]. In wet lab research there are examples of collaborative lab projects between institutions which have been found to cut costs and resources as well as increasing the sample size of experiments performed to give publishable data [13]. Openness offers scaling opportunities to inter-institutional projects which might otherwise not exist by increasing their visibility and removing barriers to further collaborative partners joining.

Tweet from @O_S_M requesting assistance synthesising molecules.

Tweet from @O_S_M requesting assistance synthesising molecules.

There are several open and citizen science projects which may offer particular scope for research-based learning. One could be the use of ecology field trips and practicals to contribute to the surveys conducted by organisations such as the UK Biological Records Centre, thus providing useful data contributions and access to a wider but directly relevant dataset for students to analyse. NutNet is a global research cooperative which sets up node sites to collect ecosystem dynamics data using standard protocols for comparison across sites globally, as this is a longitudinal study with most measurements being taken only a couple of times a year it offers good scope for practical labs. On a more ad hoc basis, projects such as Open Source Malaria offer many project and contribution opportunities e.g. a request to help make molecules on their wishlist and a GitHub hosted to do list. One way of incorporating these into curricula are team challenges in a similar vein to the iGEM synthetic biology project, which involves teams of undergraduates making bacteria with novel capabilities and contributes the DNA modules engineered to a public database of parts known as BioBricks.

In conclusion, open and citizen science projects which utilise the internet to bring together networks of people to contribute to live projects could be incorporated into inquiry-based learning in higher education to the benefit of both students and the chosen projects, allowing students to contribute truly scientifically and socially important data in the `student as producer’ model while maintaining the documented benefits of research-based pedagogies. This ranges from controlled contributions to practice particular skills through discovery-oriented tasks and challenges such as iGEM, allowing students to generate research questions independently.

There are significant challenges in implementing these types of research-based activities, many of which are true of `non-open’ projects. For instance, there are considerations around mechanisms of participation and sharing processes and outputs. Assessment becomes more challenging as students are collaborating rather than providing individual evidence of attainment. As work is done in the open, provenance and sharing of ideas requires tracking.

Conclusion

This post has introduced some ideas for teaching open science focusing on the student as both a producer and consumer of knowledge. The majority of suggestions have centred around inquiry-based learning as this brings students closer to research practices and allows social and cultural aspects of science and research to be embedded in learning experiences.

Explicitly articulating the learning aims and values that are driving the teaching design would be useful to enable students to critique them and arrive at their own conclusions about whether they agree with openness as a default condition. There is currently little systematic evidence for the proposed benefits of open science, partly because it is not widely practised in many disciplines and also as a result of the difficulty of designing research to show direct causality. Therefore, using evidence-based teaching practices that attempt to train students as scientists and critical thinkers without exposing the underlying principles of why and how they’re being taught would not be in the spirit of the exercise.

Support for increased openness and a belief that it will lead to better science is growing, so the response of the next generation of scientists and their decision about whether to incorporate these practices into their work has great implications for the future research cultures and communities. At the very least, exposure to these ideas during under- and postgraduate training will enable students to be aware of them during their research careers and make more informed decisions about their practises, values and aims as a researcher. There are exciting times ahead in science teaching!

If you’ve found this interesting, please get involved with a growing number of like-minded people via the pointers below!

Getting Involved in Open Science Training

More projects people could get involved with? Add them to the comments and the post will be updated.

References

  1. Neary, M., & Winn, J. (2009). The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher education.
  2. Peters, M. A., & Britez, R. G. (Eds.). (2008). Open education and education for openness. Sense Publishers.
  3. For a peer-reviewed paper on the OSTI initiative, see Kershaw, S.K. (2013). Hybridised Open Educational Resources and Rotation Based Learning. Open Education 2030. JRC−IPTS Vision Papers. Part III: Higher Education (pp. 140-144). Link to the paper in Academia.edu
  4. Carpenter, J., Wetheridge, L., Smith, N., Goodman, M., & Struijvé, O. (2010). Researchers of Tomorrow: A Three Year (BL/JISC) Study Tracking the Research Behaviour of’generation Y’Doctoral Students: Annual Report 2009-2010. Education for Change.
  5. Herndon, T., Ash, M., & Pollin, R. (2014). Does high public debt consistently stifle economic growth? A critique of Reinhart and Rogoff. Cambridge journal of economics, 38(2), 257-279.

  6. Roose, Kevin. (2013). Meet the 28-Year-Old Grad Student Who Just Shook the Global Austerity Movement}. New York Magazine. Available from http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/04/grad-student-who-shook-global-austerity-movement.html. Accessed 20 Dec 2014.
  7. Grahe, J. E., Reifman, A., Hermann, A. D., Walker, M., Oleson, K. C., Nario-Redmond, M., & Wiebe, R. P. (2012). Harnessing the undiscovered resource of student research projects. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(6), 605-607.
  8. Frank, M. C., & Saxe, R. (2012). Teaching replication. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(6), 600-604.
  9. Feldman, L., Patel, D., Ortmann, L., Robinson, K., & Popovic, T. (2012). Educating for the future: another important benefit of data sharing. The Lancet, 379(9829), 1877-1878.
  10. McAuley, D., Rahemtulla, H., Goulding, J., & Souch, C. (2012). 3.3 How Open Data, data literacy and Linked Data will revolutionise higher education.
  11. Lombardi, M. M. (2007). Approaches that work: How authentic learning is transforming higher education. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) Paper, 5.
  12. O’Hara, K. J., & Kay, J. S. (2003). Open source software and computer science education. Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, 18(3), 1-7.
  13. Yates, J. R., Curtis, N., & Ramus, S. J. (2006). Collaborative research in teaching: collaboration between laboratory courses at neighboring institutions. Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, 5(1), A14.

Licensing

Text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal waiver. To the extent possible under law, the author(s) have dedicated all copyright and related and neighbouring rights to this text to the public domain worldwide.

Open Books Image: by opensourceway on Flickr under CC-BY-SA 2.0

SciDataCon2014 Open Science Roundup

- November 18, 2014 in External Meetings, Featured, Research, Tools

SciDataCon 2014 was the first ever International Conference on Data Sharing and Integration for Global Sustainability jointly organised by CODATA and World Data Systems, two organisations that form part of the International Council for Science. The meeting was held 2-5 November in New Delhi and I had the pleasure of staying in the peaceful, green campus of IIT-Delhi within walking distance of SciDataCon2014 at the adjacent and equally pleasant Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).

It was a jam-packed week but I’ve tried to pick out some of my personal highlights. Puneet Kishor has also blogged on the meeting and there was an active Twitter feed for #SciDataCon2014 .

Text and Data Mining Workshop
Open Data Initiatives
Data from the People for the People
Summary
Bonus slide decks

Photo by Puneet Kishor  published under CC0 Public Domain Dedication

Photo by Puneet Kishor published under CC0 Public Domain Dedication

Text and Data Mining Workshop

On Sunday 2 November I ran a workshop with Puneet Kishor of Creative Commons as a joint venture with Open Knowledge and ContentMine. Armed with highlighters, post-it notes and USB-stick virtual machines, we led a small but dedicated and enthusiastic group of immunologists, bioinformaticians, plant genomics researchers and seabed resource experts through the basics of content mining.

Photo by Puneet Kishor  published under CC0 Public Domain Dedication

Photo by Puneet Kishor published under CC0 Public Domain Dedication

We covered what it means, when it is legal to content mine and more broadly some of the policy and legal frameworks which impact access to and rights of reuse for the scientific literature. We hand annotated entity types in two papers about lion evolution and Aspergillus fungi. This aimed to get people thinking about patterns and how to program entity recognition – what instructions does a computer require to recognise what our brain categorises easily? Swapping over the papers showed 80-90% inter-participant agreement in entity mark-up suggesting a reasonable precision and recall rate for our content mining humans!

Photo by Puneet Kishor published under CC0 Public Domain Dedication

Photo by Puneet Kishor published under CC0 Public Domain Dedication

Everybody managed to scrape multiple Open Access publications and extract species names, we also discussed potential collaborations and had a virtual visitor from afar, Peter Murray-Rust. The overwhelming feeling in the room was once of dismay at the restrictions on reuse of academic content but optimism about the potential uses of content mining – we hope that an excellent collaboration opportunity around phytochemistry will come to fruition!

Legal Implications of Text and Data Mining (TDM)

Open Data Initiatives


Several sessions over the conference highlighted how far we still have to go in terms of data sharing and particularly the challenge of gaining political will required for data sharing for global sustainability. Waltraut Ritter, a member of the active Open Knowledge local group Open Data Hong Kong, presented a paper co-authored with Scott Edmunds and others, making the case to policy makers that open data can support science and innovation. There is no guidance from the Hong Kong University Grants Committee on dissemination of research data resulting from its 7.5 billion HKD annual funding pool. Data sharing was explicitly flagged as low priority in 2011 and on enquiry in 2014 Open Data HK were informed that this assessment had not changed. Arguments to appeal to policy makers are clearly required in these situations and Waltraut expanded on a few during the talk.

Exploring the complexities of sharing data for public health research, Sanna Meherally reported on a qualitative study examining the ethical and practical background to potential research data sharing, involving five sites in Asia and Africa, and focusing on stakeholder perspectives. A key takeaway message was the importance of considering cultural barriers to implementation of funder data policies. Chief concerns raised in interviews were confidentiality, the potential for data collection efforts to be underplayed and the need to give something back to research participants. That the latter point was raised by so many researchers interviewed is encouraging given the title of the next day’s session ‘Data from the people for the people’, which was another focus of SciDataCon.

Data from the People for the People – encouraging Re-use and Collaboration

This double session focused on citizen science projects around topics related to sustainability, including biodiversity and climate change. Norbert Schmidt introduced projects in the Netherlands to monitor air quality while Raman Kumar from the Nature Conservation Foundation introduced a range of bird and plant ecology citizen science projects in India such as eBird, MigrantWatch and SeasonWatch. You can find the full session list here.

Cumulative hours of birding as of Sep 214 through the eBird India citizen science initiative

Most questions raised surrounded the validation of data quality from citizen scientists, which has been addressed at length by several projects. Later presentations and discussions moved to some very pressing matter in participatory science – how to build and retain and community of contributors and how to manage outputs in a way that is accessible to and benefits contributors, a similar point to that raised by Sanna Meherally. Retention of volunteers is a particular issue in longitudinal studies in ecology, as data is required for the same locality over multiple years so repeat volunteering is essential.

Tyng-Ruey Chuang tackled some of these issues in his talk on ‘Arrangements for Data Sharing and Reuse in Citizen Science Projects‘. He asked projects to compare themselves to Wikipedia in terms of openness, participation and tools. For instance, does your project retain or strip metadata from contributed images? Tyng-Ruey also emphasised informed participation – clearly state if citizen contributions are prima facie uncopyrightable or ask agreement for open licensing. This chimed with earlier points by Ryosuke Shibasaki about the need for citizen ownership of contributed data and agency to make informed decisions about its use.

The talk ended with a call to action, as the Open Definition was practically quoted and Tyng-Ruey called for raw data, now! He’s in good company at Open Knowledge!

Arrangements for Data Sharing and Reuse in Citizen Science Projects

Summary

The sessions above are only a small subset of the conversations happening across the whole programme and papers are available online for all sessions. There were many demands for more open data, from Theo Bloom using her keynote to call for the abolition of data release embargos to Chaitanya Baruo revealing that Indian geology students are using US data because India does not make its own data available for open academic research. However, there were also excellent case studies of the reuse of data and its value. It would have been interesting to see some more cross-cutting sessions including all of the data collection and sharing cycle, but that will need to wait for 2016! This is a thoroughly recommended conference for data scientists and managers as well as domain experts and has notable participation from the global South, which is excellent and enriches the perspectives discussed.

Finally, I can only apologise for not being able to report on the Strategies Towards Open Science Panel – I was giving a talk at IIT which clashed with the session, but I’ve no doubt some excellent points were raised which will soon be shared!

Bonus slide decks

I couldn’t attend these sessions, but they’re worth a look! First up Susanna Sansone and Brian Hole on data journals:

The great potential of citizen science

- November 12, 2014 in Featured, Guest Post, Research

This is a guest post by Benedikt Fecher of The Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) and is re-posted from the HIIG blog

Citizen science is nothing new

What do Benjamin Franklin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Francis Bacon have in common?

All were amateur scientists. Franklin invented the lightning rod, Goethe discovered the incisive bone and was moderately successful as an art theorist and Bacon can be considered as nothing less than the father of empiricism, or can he? Either way, the three shared a passion for discovering things in their spare time. None of them earned their pennies as professional scientists, if that profession even existed back then.

 

Discovery is a matter of thirst for adventure

Discovery is a matter of thirst for adventure

Citizen science is in fact old hat. It existed long before disciplines existed and could be described as the rightful predecessor of all empirical science. It laid the foundations for what we know today as the scientific method: the rule-governed and verifiable analysis of the world around us. Still, amateurs in science have often become marginalized over the past 150 years, as scientific disciplines have emerged and being a scientist has become a real thing to do (read more here).

Citizen science’s second spring

Today, citizen science is experiencing a second spring and it is no surprise that the internet has had a hand in it. In recent years, hundreds of citizen science projects have popped up, and they’re encouraging people to spend their time tagging, categorizing and counting in the name of science (see here and here). Some unfold proteins in an online game (Foldit), while others describe galaxies from satellite images (GalaxyZoo and here) or count wild boars in Berlin and deliver the numbers to an online platform (Wild boars in the city). Citizen science has moved online. And there are thousands of people in thousand different places that do many of funny things that can alter the face of science. The Internet is where they meet.

Berlin Wall; East Side Gallery

Berlin Wall; East Side Gallery

The logic of Internet-based citizen science: Large scale, low involvement

Citizen science today works differently to the citizen science of Goethe’s or Franklin’s time. The decentralised and voluntary character of today’s citizen science projects questions the way research has been done for a long time. It opens up science for a multitude of voluntary knowledge workers that work (more or less) collaboratively. In some respect, the new kind of citizen science is drawing on open innovation strategies developed in the private sector. In their recent Research Policy article, Franzoni and Sauermann refer to this type of amateur science as crowd science. The the term is extremely effective at capturing the underlying mechanics of most citizen science projects, which involve low-threshold-large-scale-participation. Today, participation of volunteers in science is scalable.

The advantages of citizen science

When it comes to data collection, social participation and science communication, citizen science is promising.

For scientists, it is an excellent way to collect data. If you visit one of the citizen science directories (for example here and here) and scroll through the projects, you will see that most of them involve some kind of documenting. These citizen scientists count rhinoceros beetles, wild boars, salamanders, neophytes, mountains and trees. There is nothing that cannot be quantified, and a life solely devoted to counting the number of rhinoceros beetles in North America would indeed be mundane for an individual scientist, not to speak of the travel expenses. Citizen scientists are great data sensors.

For citizen scientists it is a way of partaking in the process of discovery and learning about fields that interest them. For example, in a German project from the Naturschutzbund (German Society for the Conservation of Nature), sports divers are asked to count macrophytes in Northern German lakes. The data the divers collect help monitoring the ‘state of health’ of their freshwater lakes. In follow-up sessions, the divers are informed about the results. The case illustrates how citizen science works. Volunteers help scientists and in return receive first-hand information about the results. In this regard, citizen science can be an excellent communication and education tool.

Citizen science brings insight from without into the academic ivory tower and allows researchers and interested non-researchers to engage in a productive dialogue. This is a much-needed opportunity: for some time now, scholars and policy makers have been saying how challenging it is to open up science and involve citizens. Still, what makes the new kind of internet-enabled citizen science science, is rather the context volunteers work in than the tasks they perform.

The honey bee problem of citizen science

The old citizen scientists, like Franklin, Goethe or Bacon asked questions, investigated them and eventually discovered something, like Goethe did with his incisive bone. In most citizen science projects today, however, amateurs perform rather mundane tasks like documenting things (see above), outsourcing computing power (e.g. SETI@home) or playing games (e.g. Foldit). You can go to the Scientific American’s citizen science webpage and search for the word ‘help’ and you will find that out of 15 featured projects, 13 are teasered help scientists do something. The division of roles between citizens and real scientists is evident. Citizen scientists perform honey bee tasks. The analytic capacity remains with real researchers. Citizen science today is often a twofold euphemism.

That is not to say that collecting, documenting and counting is not a crucial part of research. In many ways the limited task complexity even resembles the day-to-day business of in-person research teams. Citizen scientists, on the other hand, can work when they want to and on what they want to. That being said, citizen science is still a win win in terms of data collection and citizen involvement.

An alternative way to think of citizen science: Small scale, high involvement

A second way of doing citizen science is not to think of volunteers as thousands of little helpers but as knowledge workers on a par with professional researchers. This small-scale type of citizen science is sometimes swept under the mat even though it is equally promising.

Timothy Gower’s Polymath Project is a good case for the small-scale-high-involvement type of citizen science. In 2009, Gowers challenged the readers of his blog to find a new combinatorial proof of the density version of the Hales-Jewett theorem. One has to know, that Gowers is a field medallist in math and apparently his readers share the same passion. After seven weeks, he announced that the problem had been solved with the help of 40 volunteers, a number far too small to count as massively collaborative.

Nevertheless, Gower’s approach was successful. And it designated an form of citizen science in which a few volunteers commit themselves for a longer period to solve a problem. This form of citizen science is fascinating regarding its capacity to harvest tacit expert knowledge that does not reside in a scientific profession. The participation is smaller in scale but higher in quality. It resembles Benkler’s commons-based peer production or the collective invention concept from open innovation.

The core challenges for this kind of citizen science is to motivate and enable expert volunteers to make a long-term commitment to a scientific problem.

Both strategies, the large scale low involvement participation as well as the small scale high involvement participation have the capacity to alter science. The second however would be a form of citizen science that lives up to its name. Or did you never want to discover your own incisive bone?

Goethe and the incisive bone

Goethe and the incisive bone

Pictures

  1. Franklin with kite: Franklin’s Experiment, June 1752
  2. Wall: Own picture
  3. Goethe dozing on stones: Goethe in the Roman Campagna (1786) by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein.
  4. Incisive bone, Gray’s Anatomy, 1918

Thanks to Roisin Cronin, Julian Staben, Cornelius Puschmann, Sascha Friesike and Kaja Scheliga for their help.

Improving openness, transparency and reproducibility in scientific research

- October 24, 2014 in Featured, Guest Post, Reproducibility, Research, Tools

This is a guest post for Open Access Week by Sara Bowman of the Open Science Framework.

Understanding reproducibility in science

Reproducibility is fundamental to the advancement of science. Unless experiments and findings in the literature can be reproduced by others in the field, the improvement of scientific theory is hindered. Scholarly publications disseminate scientific findings, and the process of peer review ensures that methods and findings are scrutinized prior to publication. Yet, recent reports indicate that many published findings cannot be reproduced. Across domains, from organic chemistry ((Trevor Laird, “Editorial Reproducibility of Results” Organic
Process Research and Development) to drug discovery (Asher Mullard, “Reliability
of New Drug Target Claims Called Into Question

Nature Reviews Drug Development) to psychology (Meyer and Chabris, “Why Psychologists’ Food Fight Matters” Slate), scientists are discovering difficulties in replicating
published results.

Various groups have tried to uncover why results are unreliable or what characteristics make studies less reproducible (see John Ioannidis’s “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” PLoS, for example). Still others look for ways to incentivize practices that promote accuracy in scientific publishing (see Nosek, Spies, and Motyl, “Scientific Utopia II: Restructuring Incentives and Practices to Promote Truth Over Publishability” Perspectives on Psychological Science). In all of these, the underlying theme is the need for transparency surrounding the research process – in order to learn more about what makes research reproducible, we must know more about how the research was conducted
and how the analyses were performed.
Data, code, and materials sharing can shed light on research design and analysis decisions that lead to reproducibility. Enabling and incentivizing these practices is the goal of The Open Science Framework, a free, open source web application built by the Center for Open Science.


The right tools for the job

The
Open Science Framework (OSF)
helps researchers manage their research workflow and enables data and materials sharing both with collaborators and with the public. The philosophy behind the OSF is to meet researchers where they are, while providing an easy means for opening up their research if it’s desired or the time is right. Any project hosted on the OSF is private to collaborators by default, but making the materials open to the public is accomplished with a simple click of a button.

Here, the project page for the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology demonstrates the many features of the Open Science Framework (OSF). Managing contributors, uploading files, keeping track of progress and providing context on a wiki, and accessing view and download statistics are all available through the project page.

Here, the project page for the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology demonstrates the many features of the Open Science Framework (OSF). Managing contributors, uploading files, keeping track of progress and providing context on a wiki, and accessing view and download statistics are all available through the project page.

Features of the OSF facilitate transparency and good scientific practice
with minimal burden on the researcher. The OSF logs all actions by contributors and maintains full version control. Every time a new version of a file is uploaded to the OSF, the previous versions are
maintained so that a user can always go back to an old revision. The OSF performs logging and maintains version control without the researcher ever having to think about it – no added steps to the workflow, no extra record-keeping to deal with.

The OSF integrates with other services (e.g., GitHub, Dataverse, and Dropbox)
so that researchers continue to use the tools that are practical, helpful, and a part of the workflow, but gain value from the other features the OSF offers. An added benefit is in seeing materials from
a variety of services next to each other – code on GitHub and files on Dropbox or AmazonS3 appear next to each other on the OSF – streamlining research and analysis processes and improving workflows.

 Each project, file, and user on the OSF has a persistent URL, making content citable. The project in this screenshot can be found at https://osf.io/tvyxz.

Each project, file, and user on the OSF has a persistent URL, making content citable. The project in this screenshot can be found at https://osf.io/tvyxz.

Other features of the OSF incentivize researchers to open up their data and materials. Each project, file, and user is given a globally unique identifier – making all materials citable and ensuring
researchers get credit for their work. Once materials are publicly available, the authors can access statistics detailing the number of views and downloads of their materials, as well as geographic
information about viewers. Additionally, the OSF applies the idea of “forks,” commonly used in open source software development, to scientific research. A user can create a fork of another project, to
indicate that the new work builds on the forked project or was inspired by the forked project. A fork serves as a functional citation; as the network of forks grows, the interconnectedness of a body of research becomes apparent.

Openness and transparency about the scientific process informs the development of best practices for reproducible research. The OSF seeks both to enable that transparency, by taking care of “behind
the scenes” logging and versioning without added burden on the researcher – and to improve overall efficiency for researchers and their daily workflows. By providing tools for researchers to
easily adopt more open practices, the Center for Open Science and the OSF seek to improve openness, transparency, and – ultimately – reproducibility in scientific research.

Open Science at Tech4Dev 2014

- June 10, 2014 in External Meetings, Meetings, Research

Winner of the #LavauxContest photo competition at #t4d2014 from @GabrielaTejadaG

Winner of the #LavauxContest photo competition at #t4d2014 from @GabrielaTejadaG

Denisa Kera and Sachiko Hirosue pulled together a fabulous session at Tech4Dev 2014 #t4d2014 at the SwissTech Convention centre in sunny Lausanne. The conference was organised by CODEV and the UNESCO Chair in Sustainable Technologies and focused on ‘What is essential?’ in technology for development. Many answers to this question discussed throughout the three days converged around collaboration with communities, with many sessions highlighting examples of co-design and co-creation across a range of technologies for development including water, energy, healthcare and ICTs for education. This recognition of and commitment to participation and collaboration in reseach for development relates strongly to work completed by the open science working group and the OpenUCT initiative funded by IDRC (documented here, working paper available online).

The session ‘The Openness Paradigm: How Synergies Between Open Access, Open Data, Open Science, Open Source Hardware, Open Drug Discovery Approaches Support Development?’ covered a range of topics reflecting the breadth of practices that constitute open science but the two key areas of interest were open hardware for science and open data.

First speaker up was Professor Irfan Prijambada from Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, who described the necessity of access to lab equipment for his microbiology research focused on agricultural practices and fermentation. Fermentation is important for alcoholic drinks but also the fermentation of cassava and rice to produce traditional Indonesian foods such as tapei. Further aspects of research in the Laboratory of Agricultural Microbiology centre around soil and water microbiology, including biodegradation and bioremediation in volcanic soils. As any microbiologist knows, the ability to observe small lifeforms and a sterile environment in which to culture and work with them are the two most essential research requirements in the lab. Prof Prijambada described the resultant difficulties of performing research effectively when dealing with obsolete and inadequate research equipment, relying on out of date microscopes with no digital image collection and plating microorganisms on agar in open spaces next to a bunsen burner with no access to a clean hood or laminar flow hood, both standard pieces of equipment for maintaining a near-sterile environment and ensuring samples are not contaminated. To add to these difficulties, applying for funding for equipment procurement at the university can mean a 12 month wait for processing and delivery even if the application is approved. There was a clear need for cheap, rapid and local supply of essential kit.

miCAM v3.2 on display at Tech4Dev. Photo by Jenny Molloy, all rights waived under CC0.

miCAM v3.2 on display at Tech4Dev. Photo by Jenny Molloy, all rights waived under CC0.

Step in Hackteria.org. In 2009 after a workshop in Yogyakarta run by Marc Dusseiller, an active maker and advocate of DIY biology and open source hardware, Prof Prijambada and his lab set about taking a DIY approach to lab hardware by creating their own clean hood and laminar flow hood, initially using a glassfibre filter but now employing a series of HEPA filters. The equipment was constructed in only 2 months for less than 10% of the cost of a commercial equivalent (1.2m IDR vs 15m IDR). Microscopes were constructed from webcams in less that one month costing 750k IDR instead of 7m IDR and were entirely adequate for research needs. Not only adequate, but aquisition of digital images allowed an automated colony counter to be developed. The importance and utility of these microscopes was explained by their developer Nur Akbar Arofatullah, a researcher at Gadjah Mada University, who founded the Lifepatch initiative and along with other hardware projects, has improved the DIY microscopes to the stage where a company is now offering a commercial version of the latest MiCAM v3.2 for those who don’t find DIY appealing. However, hands-on construction remains a key part of the educational aims of open hardware and Lifepatch are using the microscopes and their construction for a range of workshops pitched at different educational levels. Kindergarten students compare the width of their hair in Cyber Hair Wars, elementary students learn about plant and muscle cells, high school students construct their own microscopes while their teachers are taught how to run workshops themselves. University students are enthused with the DIY spirit and encouraged to apply these principles in their own education and research.

One area where Gadjah Mada University excels is community relations. Setting an example for all publicly funded research establishments, staff and students are expected and obliged to work with the community to achieve promotion within the university and there exists a dedicated Office of Research and Community Development. Within this ethos, DIY microscopes have been used to bridge knowledge between the university and community through workshops on sanitation and hygiene which make use of the microscopes and microbiology techniques to analyse water, take handswabs and analyse data on E. coli contamination. Lifepatch have run the Jogja River Project for several years, taking an integrative approach to water quality and river monitoring including participatory mapping and data collection on vegetation and animals all the way through to active clean up operations. Innovation in DIY hardware is rapid at Lifepatch and Gadjah Mada, with other projects including a vortex, rotator for incubating bacterial samples and a pipette stand. As per the example of MiCAM, the DIY approach is still compatible with commercialisation as people can buy pre-built hardware, thus offering the possibility of generating jobs and income but there are many questions around models for these activities which were of interest to the audience but could easily fill an entire session and were not covered in any depth (see reports here and here for an introduction).

In a related talk during a later session at a beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Lavaux vineyards on the banks of Lake Geneva, Dara Dotz presented on 3D printing open hardware during another session which touched on the creation of jobs and hyper local digital manufacturing capacity in Port au Prince, Haiti. Dara travelled to Haiti for three weeks and ended up staying for a year working for an NGO. She observed problems in water treatment plants and in hospitals which were caused by a lack of supplies and particularly spare parts due to a broken supply chain including long shipping and customs quarantine times, a culture of bribes and poor transport links for distribution. After a friend attended the delivery of 5 babies in one evening and had no option for tying off umbilical chords but using her own gloves, Dara realised that her background interest and contacts in 3D printing could be used to solve some of the issues of obtaining plastic parts and consumables. Having brought a Maker-bot 3D printer into Haiti, Dara trained a group of Haitians with basic education to use the printers and 3D design software and several potential uses were identified, with critical application being umbilical chord clips, splitters for oxygen tubing to allow multiple patients to receive oxygen from the same cyclinder and IV bag hooks to reduce the use of large IV stands which blocked space in already overcrowded wards.

3D Printing Umbilical Cord Clamps for babies in Haiti! from Not Impossible on Vimeo.

There were many considerations and design challenges to be addressed such as ensuring that designs addressed community needs and were designed with, by and for local people. In addition to empowering people to produce there own solutions to address real-time problems, the manufacturing method has the benefit of being on-demand, helping to ensure cleanliness of equipment, provides jobs and is also cheaper than importation of commercial equipment. Umbilical clips can be manufactured for $0.36 compared to $2.69 imported cost, representing a significant saving over time in this resource poor setting. Dara is now applying the same ideas to disaster zone supplies through the NGO fieldready.org and plans extensions to the Haiti project including importing CNC machines to allow manufacture of metal parts, creating a repository of designs for field supplies and increasing the use of recycled plastic waste for non-clinical devices and prototyping.

The Open Source Hardware approach advocated throughout this session is supported by the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), a non-profit aiming to raise awareness of OSHW and to spur innovation by hobbyists, commercial and academic users. Gabriella Levine is President of the OSHWA Board and an artist with an interest in snake biomimicry. She introduced two projects designed for sensing water quality and clearing oil waste – Protei and Sneel, a snake biomimetic robot designed iteratively by Gabriella and documented online.

two sneels together playing from gabriella levine on Vimeo.

PROTEI PRESENTATION VIDEO from toni nottebohm on Vimeo.

These modular sailing and swimming robots allow sensors for oil, plastic waste,temperature, radioactivity and more to be attached and move through the water autonomously or via remote control, taking readings as they go. These concepts have been used in a range of water quality workshops and Gabriella runs hackdays exploring ideas around the design and deployment of water quality monitoring sensors and other hardware, including a water hackathon at Tech4Dev the following day!

With a variety of DIY and OSHW approaches and designs being prototyped and promoted in areas as important as sensors and even medical devices, a major question becomes how to ensure that quality is consistent and devices work accurately and safely. The current systems of quality assurance regulations in various countries are often either complex, expensive, time-consuming and a massive barrier to market entry – or non-existent. Kate Ettinger is working to develop a system for collecting information on quality and accuracy of OSHW projects in an open and transparent way using an open source hardware/software data collection system and an open data approach to making information available. This framework could apply to many projects but Kate used the examples of neonatal incubators and prosthetic limbs, with data being collected to accelerate responsive design and ensure ‘integrity by design’ throughout the development and deployment of open source medical devices.

OpenQRS in 30 Seconds from Kate Ettinger on Vimeo.

From open data for open hardware to open data as a research tool, Nanjira Sambuli from iHub in Nairobi described the use of crowd sourced data during the Kenyan elections in 2013 and contrasted data collected from Twitter and other social networks via passive crowdsourcing with active sourcing organised by Ushahidi. Conclusions presented were that machine learning algorithms are necessary to make collection of large datasets from high volume social networks viable and that there were surprising patterns and voices gathered through passive listening rather than active calls for information. Nanjira presented a framework developed by iHub for election data crowdsourcing emphasising the three V’s – viability, validity and verification.

jb_CrowdsourcingInfographice

Integrity and curation of scientific data was also highlighted in the final talk by Scott Edmunds of GigaScience , during which he described some excellent case studies of the power of openness. One example was increasing the rapidity of disease research during the E.coli outbreak in Europe in 2011, where BGI rapidly sequenced and released the genome as open data. The image of the chromosome map was later chosen as the front cover of a major report from The Royal Society in the UK on openness in science. Another example looked at the great scope for crowd sourcing the collection and analysis of open datasets. Research on Ash Die Back, an invasive tree disease, demonstrated several flavours of citizen science from publicly contributed geo-tagged photos of infected trees for OpenAshDB to gamification of genome data analysis via the Facebook game Fraxinus. It is also clear that citizens are very keen to support local research that is important for them and wish data to be made public to enrich their scientific and cultural heritage. The Puerto Rican “People’s Parrot” genome project took an endangered and much loved national symbol and sequenced its genome to learn more about its uniqueness and evolutionary history. This effort was funded by fashion shows, art projects, concerts, a branded beer and public donations. Scott focused on these successes but also discussed the challenges in increasing open data release, including ensuring researchers get appropriate credit and are incentivised to make their data available.

The BGI sequenced chromosome of the German E.coli outbreak strain.

The BGI sequenced chromosome of the German E.coli outbreak strain.

A common theme running through the presentations was that openness can be effective at accelerating innovation and enabling research in resource-poor settings. In addition, the scope for education and democratisation of the scientific process through involvement of local communities in scientific research and technological innovation has variously led to employment, empowerment and increased opportunities. The challenge now is to establish under what contexts this remains true and work to advocate and support open approaches where they can offer benefits for scientists and citizens in the global South. I hope members of this working group and the rest of the global open science community will be able to contribute to this mission!

What is content mining?

- March 27, 2014 in Research

It’s simple really – you can break it down into its two constituent parts:

  1. Content

In this context, content can be text, numerical data, static images such as photographs, videos, audio, metadata or any digital information, and/or a combination of them all. It is a deliberately vague term, encompassing all types of information. Do not confuse content for the medium by which content is delivered; content is independent of medium in the digital sphere.

  1. Mining

In this context, mining refers to the large-scale of information extraction from your target content. If you extract information from just one or two items of content – that’s ‘data extraction’. But if you extract information from thousands of separate items of content – that’s ‘mining’.

content mining can involve multiple types of content!

It is important to emphasise that the phrase ‘text & data mining’ refers only to the mining a subset of the types of content one may wish to mine: text & data. Content mining is thus a more useful generic phrase that encompasses all the types of content one may wish to mine.

For my postdoc I’m using content mining to extract phylogenetic information and associated metadata from the academic literature. To be specific, the content I’m mining is text AND images.

The text of an academic paper contains much of the metadata about a phylogenetic analysis I want to extract, whilst the actual result of a phylogenetic analysis is unfortunately mostly only published as an image in papers (completely non-textual) – thus I need to leverage mining techniques for multiple content types.

Most mining projects tend to just mine one type of content, with text mining being perhaps the most common. An example question one might attempt to answer using text mining is: How many academic journal articles acknowledge funding support from the Wellcome Trust?

Peter Murray-Rust has many more different possible uses for content mining on his blog: http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2014/02/27/101-uses-for-content-mining/

In general, content mining is still an emerging and under-utilized technique in the research sphere – there is much work still to be done and billions of questions still to be answered. It isn’t the one-stop solution to everything, but for appropriate questions it can be the most powerful & comprehensive approach available. Get mining now!

Some suggested tutorials & resources you might want to start with:

* Mining with Weka tools – http://sentimentmining.net/weka/
* Mining with R tools – http://www.r-bloggers.com/text-mining-the-complete-works-of-william-shakespeare/
* Open resources – you can download ALL of the English language Wikipedia (or any other language) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#English-language_Wikipedia

* See also Project Gutenberg for literary resources to mine: http://www.gutenberg.org/

10,000 #OpenScience Tweets

- March 20, 2014 in Media, Research, Tools

We have collected 10,000+ tweets using the #openscience hashtag on Twitter, and invite volunteers to help analyse the data. The twelve most-retweeted tweets are embedded below.

Happily, just over 4,600 accounts have participated in the Open Science community with its eponymous hashtag, in this span. The 10,000 tweets have accrued over ten weeks. Our own @openscience on Twitter has tweeted most, over 600 times at the hashtag, as well as having received the most retweets and @ mentions, over 8,000 in these 10,000.

We have modified the vis which came with the data via the satisfying TAGS effort shared by Martin Hawksey. We added looks at the numbers of mentions and of mentions per tweets for top tweeters, and rankings of top tweets for the past ten weeks to Martin’s default views. We will continue collecting tweets, but do note that in another month or so, we will reach Google Docs limits e.g. on numbers of cells. We will use additional sheets, so links to all data will have changed, just how depending on when you are reading this post. Ask us @openscience on Twitter.

Help wanted

More could be done; won’t you help? Leave a reply below or ping us @openscience on Twitter if you need edit access to the sheet itself but we would like to see data and analyses in other tools as well. Our work to this point is only to get something started.

Top #openscience tweets of the past ten weeks

 

 

 

 

 

 


The above list is not dynamic. The data collected and displayed here, however are dynamic and refresh themselves hourly.

Not all tweets which are about Open Science include the #openscience hashtag. In a perfectly semantic world, they would and when they can, they really should. It has helped to form a community among the 4,600+ accounts participating in these ten weeks and many others in recent years. A couple reasons the hashtag might not be used in a relevant tweet include the character limit on tweets and lack of awareness of hashtags or of the term Open Science.

We take our organising and leadership role seriously at @openscience on Twitter, an account shared by many in the community. We have a simple policy that all our tweets should be related to Open Science. Even at our account, not all our tweets include the #openscience hashtag, particularly as we discuss related concerns such as Citizen Science or Open Access. An example tweet from the time frame considered here, related to Open Science but not hashtagged as such is below. In this case, the limit on tweet length and the topic led to including #openaccess, not #openscience:

 

The most retweeted, Open Science related tweet of all time, so far as we know, did not use the #openscience hashtag but was lovely. From the Lord of Dance and Prince of Swimwear:

 

Building an archaeological project repository I: Open Science means Open Data

- February 27, 2014 in Guest Post, Research

This is a guest post by Anthony Beck, Honorary
fellow, and Dave Harrison, Research fellow, at the University of Leeds School of
Computing.

In 2010 we authored a series of blog posts for the Open Knowledge Foundation subtitled ‘How open approaches can empower archaeologists’. These discussed the DART project, which is on the cusp of concluding.

The DART project collected
large amounts of data, and as part of the project, we created a
purpose-built data
repository
to catalogue this and make it available, using CKAN, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s
open-source data catalogue and repository. Here we revisit the need
for Open Science in the light of the DART project. In a subsequent
post we’ll look at why, with so many repositories of different kinds,
we felt that to do Open Science successfully we needed to roll our
own.

Open data can change science

Open inquiry is at the heart of the scientific enterprise. Publication
of scientific theories – and of the experimental and observational data
on which they are based – permits others to identify errors, to support,
reject or refine theories and to reuse data for further understanding
and knowledge. Science’s powerful capacity for self-correction comes from
this openness to scrutiny and challenge. (The Royal Society,
Science as an open enterprise, 2012)

The Royal Society’s report Science as an open enterprise
identifies how 21st century communication technologies are changing
the ways in which scientists conduct, and society engages with,
science. The report recognises that ‘open’ enquiry is pivotal for the
success of science, both in research and in society. This goes beyond
open access to publications (Open Access), to include access
to data and other research outputs (Open Data), and the
process by which data is turned into knowledge (Open
Science).

The underlying rationale of Open Data is this: unfettered access to
large amounts of ‘raw’ data enables patterns of re-use and knowledge
creation that were previously impossible. The creation of a rich,
openly accessible corpus of data introduces a range of data-mining and
visualisation challenges, which require multi-disciplinary
collaboration across domains (within and outside academia) if their
potential is to be realised. An important step towards this is
creating frameworks which allow data to be effectively accessed and
re-used
. The prize for succeeding is improved knowledge-led policy
and practice that transforms communities, practitioners, science and
society.

The need for such frameworks will be most acute in disciplines with
large amounts of data, a range of approaches to analysing the data,
and broad cross-disciplinary links – so it was inevitable that they
would prove important for our project, Detection of Archaeological
residues using Remote sensing Techniques (DART).

DART: data-driven archaeology

DART aimed is to develop analytical methods to differentiate
archaeological sediments from non-archaeological strata, on the basis
of remotely detected phenomena (e.g. resistivity, apparent dielectric
permittivity, crop growth, thermal properties etc). The data collected
by DART is of relevance to a broad range of different communities.
Open Science was adopted with two aims:

  • to maximise the research impact by placing the project data and
    the processing algorithms into the public sphere;
  • to build a community of researchers and other end-users around the
    data so that collaboration, and by extension research value, can be
    enhanced.

‘Contrast dynamics’, the type of data provided by DART, is critical
for policy makers and curatorial managers to assess both the state and
the rate of change in heritage landscapes, and helps to address
European Landscape Convention (ELC) commitments. Making the best use
of the data, however, depends on openly accessible dynamic monitoring,
along the lines of that developed for the Global Monitoring for
Environment and Security (GMES) satellite constellations under
development by the European Space Agency. What is required is an
accessible framework which allows all this data to be integrated,
processed and modelled in a timely manner.

It is critical that policy makers and curatorial managers are able
to assess both the state and the rate of change in heritage
landscapes. This need is wrapped up in national commitments to the
European Landscape Convention (ELC). Making the best use of the data,
however, depends on openly accessible dynamic monitoring, along
similar lines to that proposed by the European Space Agency for the
Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) satellite
constellations. What is required is an accessible framework which
allows all this data to be integrated, processed and modelled in a
timely manner. The approaches developed in DART to improve the
understanding and enhance the modelling of heritage contrast detection
dynamics feeds directly into this long-term agenda.

Cross-disciplinary research and Open Science

Such approaches cannot be undertaken within a single domain of
expertise. This vision can only be built by openly collaborating with
other scientists and building on shared data, tools and techniques.
Important developments will come from the GMES community, particularly
from precision agriculture, soil science, and well documented data
processing frameworks and services. At the same time, the information
collected by projects like DART can be re-used easily by others. For
example, DART data has been exploited by the Royal Agricultural
University (RAU) for use in such applications as carbon sequestration
in hedges, soil management, soil compaction and community mapping.
Such openness also promotes collaboration: DART partners have been
involved in a number of international grant proposals and have
developed a longer term partnership with the RAU.

Open Science advocates opening access to data, and other scientific
objects, at a much earlier stage in the research life-cycle than
traditional approaches. Open Scientists argue that research synergy
and serendipity occur through openly collaborating with other
researchers (more eyes/minds looking at the problem). Of great
importance is the fact that the scientific process itself is
transparent and can be peer reviewed: as a result of exposing data and
the processes by which these data are transformed into information,
other researchers can replicate and validate the techniques. As a
consequence, we believe that collaboration is enhanced and the
boundaries between public, professional and amateur are blurred.

Challenges ahead for Open Science

Whilst DART has not achieved all its aims, it has made significant
progress and has identified some barriers in achieving such open
approaches. Key to this is the articulation of issues surrounding
data-access (accreditation), licensing and ethics. Who gets access to data, when, and under what conditions, is a serious ethical issue for the heritage sector. These are obviously issues that need co-ordination through organisations like Research Councils UK with
cross-cutting input from domain groups. The Arts and Humanities
community produce data and outputs with pervasive social and ethical
impact, and it is clearly important that they have a voice in these
debates.

Content Mining: Scholarly Data Liberation Workshop

- December 14, 2013 in events, Oxford Open Science, Research, Tools

The November Oxford Open Science meeting brought over 20 researchers together for a ‘Content Mining: Scholarly Data Liberation Workshop’.

Iain Emsley and Peter Murray-Rust kicked off proceedings by presenting their work on mining Twitter and academic papers in chemistry and phylogenetics respectively.

Next we tried out web-based tools such as Tabula for extracting tables from PDF (we were fortunate enough to have Manuel Aristarán of Tabula joining us remotely via Skype) and ChemicalTagger for tagging and parsing experimental sections in chemistry articles.

OOS

We then got down to business with some hands-on extraction of species from HTML papers and mentions of books on Twitter using regular expressions. All code is open source so you are welcome and encouraged to play, fork and reuse!

Peter’s tutorial and code to extract species from papers can be found on bitbucket and the relevant software and command line tools have helpfully been bundled into a downloadable package. Iain has also documented his flask application for Twitter mining on github so have a go!

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Some furry friends joined in the efforts - met Chuff the OKF Okapi and AMI the kangaroo

Some furry friends joined in the efforts – met Chuff the OKF Okapi and AMI the kangaroo

Open and transparent altmetrics for discovery

- December 9, 2013 in Panton Fellowships, Research, Tools

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by AG Cann

Altmetrics are a hot topic in scientific community right now. Classic citation-based indicators such as the impact factor are amended by alternative metrics generated from online platforms. Usage statistics (downloads, readership) are often employed, but links, likes and shares on the web and in social media are considered as well. The altmetrics promise, as laid out in the excellent manifesto, is that they assess impact quicker and on a broader scale.

The main focus of altmetrics at the moment is evaluation of scientific output. Examples are the article-level metrics in PLOS journals, and the Altmetric donut. ImpactStory has a slightly different focus, as it aims to evaluate the oeuvre of an author rather than an individual paper.

This is all good and well, but in my opinion, altmetrics have a huge potential for discovery that goes beyond rankings of top papers and researchers. A potential that is largely untapped so far.

How so? To answer this question, it is helpful to shed a little light on the history of citation indices.

Pathways through science

In 1955, Eugene Garfield created the Science Citation Index (SCI) which later went on to become the Web of Knowledge. His initial idea – next to measuring impact – was to record citations in a large index to create pathways through science. Thus one can link papers that are not linked by shared keywords. It makes a lot of sense: you can talk about the same thing using totally different terminology, especially when you are not in the same field. Furthermore, terminology has proven to be very fluent even in the same domain (Leydesdorff 1997). In 1973, Small and Marshakova realized – independently from each other – that co-citation is a measure of subject similarity and therefore can be used to map a scientific field.

Due to the fact that citations are considerably delayed, however, co-citation maps are often a look into the past and not a timely overview of a scientific field.

Altmetrics for discovery

In come altmetrics. Similarly to citations, they can create pathways through science. After all, a citation is nothing else but a link to another paper. With altmetrics, it is not so much which papers are often referenced together, but rather which papers are often accessed, read, or linked together. The main advantage of altmetrics, as with impact, is that they are much earlier available.

clickstream_map

Bollen et al. (2009): Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science. PLOS One. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0004803.

One of the efforts in this direction is the work of Bollen et al. (2009) on click-streams. Using the sequences of clicks to different journals, they create a map of science (see above).

In my PhD, I looked at the potential of readership statistics for knowledge domain visualizations. It turns out that co-readership is a good indicator for subject similarity. This allowed me to visualize the field of educational technology based on Mendeley readership data (see below). You can find the web visualization called Head Start here and the code here (username: anonymous, leave password blank).

headstart

http://labs.mendeley.com/headstart

Why we need open and transparent altmetrics

The evaluation of Head Start showed that the overview is indeed more timely than maps based on citations. It, however, also provided further evidence that altmetrics are prone to sample biases. In the visualization of educational technology, the computer science driven areas such as adaptive hypermedia are largely missing. Bollen and Van de Sompel (2008) reported the same problem when they compared rankings based on usage data to rankings based on the impact factor.

It is therefore important that altmetrics are transparent and reproducible, and that the underlying data is openly available. This is the only way to ensure that all possible biases can be understood.

As part of my Panton Fellowship, I will try to find datasets that satisfy these criteria. There are several examples of open bibliometric data, such as the Mendeley API, and figshare API that have adopted CC BY, but most of the usage data is not available publicly or cannot be redistributed. In my fellowship, I want to evaluate the goodness of fit of different open altmetrics data. Furthermore, I plan to create more knowledge domain visualizations such as the one above.

So if you know any good datasets please leave a comment below. Of course any other comments on the idea are much appreciated as well.